


The Dancing-Place

by Fontainebleau



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:08:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24778165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fontainebleau/pseuds/Fontainebleau
Summary: Written for the Mag7 Summer Swagbag June prompt: " Write a fic from the point of view of an inanimate object."
Comments: 10
Kudos: 15
Collections: Mag7 Summer Swagbag Challenge





	The Dancing-Place

I lived a lifetime, and I am grateful for that. Even the greatest of cities must be born to a small beginning, no more than a huddle of huts behind a wooden palisade or a camp of tents on a foreign shore, and no city at its start can know its own destiny. Some will grow to grandeur, their names as towering as their walls and ziggurats: Babylon, Palenque, Luxor. Some will flare like comets, their golden ages a wonder to history; some will live long, eternal and mysterious: Baghdad and Samarkhand, Rome and Alexandria... But many never grow to live at all, born only to die in a year or two with the ground barely broken for tilling, sown with graves and left for the dust to blow through their bones. I lived a lifetime and that alone is enough.

I harboured no great ambition. I did not wish for great mansions and gaslit streets, wrought-iron balconies or riverboats; I wanted only to prosper, to protect, to offer shelter and peace, and those early days were good to me. My people were farmers, blacksmiths, schoolteachers, godfearing and temperate, and though I had little to impress, only a white-painted church, testament to my people’s faith, and a handful of false-fronted stores, yet for them I was more. I was the broad fields of nodding grain, the flocks of long-eared goats and the foals frisking in the meadow; I was the clear water of the creek and the sun through the cottonwoods, the oxcart coming loaded homeward on the road at sunset. I would have been content to live so, a tiny town with an unsung name. 

It was the glitter in the rocks that betrayed me and set my fate on its path. The miners came with their picks and dynamite, and the company men followed with bankboxes and deeds, and I thought I saw how it must go: I readied myself for the blasting and scouring, for my creek to run dark with tailings and my ground to shake with the roar of machinery. As my church fell in flames I mourned for my honest farmers with their cattle and their children, their toil and their simple pride; I thought to see myself become a shanty town, a place where men’s labour and hope were crushed and milled to disillusion and the quick oblivion of the saloon and whorehouse. Not for one moment did I suspect what was to come.

The flame-haired woman laid her husband into my embrace and rode away, grief clutched to her chest like a child, and I paid her no heed, one among so many. But when she returned with steel in her spine and seven riders behind her, when the warriors she had brought strode through my streets and left their footsteps printed red behind them, I read the weight of destiny in their leader’s face and I trembled. If such as these had come, no ordinary tale was mine: like Tagata, like Tepoztlan and Hejizhen, like ancient Thebes, I was become a name in a story much older than I – Rose Creek, where the Seven fought and conquered. Fate set me in good company, at least.

\--

Is it a blessing or a curse, to be a stage for the eternal tale? It changed my people, all at once. They were no warriors, they had not thought to stand and fight, but seven men came to guide them and lit a fire under their skin. Their touch was not gentle, these saviours: champions are not made by peace and prosperity. These men were forged by cruelty, by remorse and grief, honed by loneliness and suspicion, marked each and one by the desperate life that brought them to answer their leader’s call. And at their direction my townsfolk flung aside their timidity to breach the rage within, men taking the line with shovel or razor or only their bare hands to defend what was theirs. In that furious week the meekest of men found a crazed courage with a rusted rifle in his hands, the respectable matron took up axe or knife to sharpen, the threads of status and station frayed and snapped as miner, banker and farmer stood in rank together. They were afraid, I read it in their restless dreams, but the Seven walked among them to drive out fear with a groundless impossible hope.

I also had my part to play. They were not gentle, as I said: they laid me bare to map me, then stripped me, tore apart my very fabric, my fields carved out with trenches and traps, my barns and sheds set as tinderboxes, hotel and house broken apart for makeshift defences. And by the end of it I was changed too, a crazy patched-together thing, a town become a nightmare, the touchpaper waiting for the spark. Greatness is not for the fainthearted.

One week, and then the final night, the wire of tension fine-drawn to breaking point: I saw my defenders waver beneath the weight of doubt, small madnesses blossoming on the knife-edge between betrayal and the wild cold flame of hope. Desires long-hidden birthed into the half-light, solace taken in any form it could find: the sober drinking to delirium, the virgin testing the edge of a blade, a man on his knees in the ashes of the church and not to pray. This was no self-sacrifice, hard and resolute, but a bacchanal, a delirious embrace of destruction. 

And above it all, their leader. I was nothing to him, as the townsfolk were nothing, nor his followers: he walked a solitary path, bearing the weight of a destiny written before he was a child; he bowed his head before the altar among the guttering candles, but his prayer was only for revenge. He set me as a stage with dry straw and sandbags, with hidden guns and dynamite, he paced my streets alone and I watched with him through the endless aching night. I wished it could be otherwise, I admit it, but in the inky dawn I stood at his shoulder and whispered, I am ready.

\--

It hurt. The army crashed on me like a wave, and not one atom of my being was left untouched. The burning hurt, and the chattering gun that raked and splintered my being; the explosions hurt, the farmers’ rich earth spraying and horses screaming. Death hovered in the air, its great wings fanning in the smoke as the miners and farmers fought and fell, as the heroes took their wounds and endured. There could be no deviation from the appointed path, no faltering from the strike of bullet or arrow: my earth was churned and soaked with blood, my being aflame, groaning under the last agonising explosion, and in the ashes I witnessed the final execution.

At the end of it, I was still standing. Scorched and splintered, gouged and gutted, but I had survived. The price was paid, I thought, and I was proud; the heroes who lived might not look back, but I took the fallen and folded them into my care for what peace they might find. It did not seem so then, but perhaps in that moment my life was completed: perhaps the rest could have been only pale imitation. 

There was a healing and a reclamation: my people returned, sober once more, to plane and hammer and mend, to till and sow the fields and fish the creek: the church rose white again, its bell ringing clear from the tower to summon the believers, their faith tested and found true. I and my people knew peace and prosperity again, for a while, but the dream they had fought for was no more than that, a future left to wither on the vine.

There are many ways for a town to die. Few are quick: an earthquake or volcano, black plague to leave the streets empty and coyotes nosing in the empty cellars. Most are slow – the turning years of drought or freezing winters, the silted harbour or the dwindling lake, the played-out mine or shuttered factory. My death was slow, and that I did not expect. The future came rushing in a screech of steam and smoke on iron rails, and on a map none of my people ever saw the stroke of a surveyor’s pen sealed my demise, the railroad and its brash new children bleeding the life from me, drop by sluggish drop.

\--

Now I am a ghost, or less than a ghost, the living essence of a town long-vanished, wandering the in-between where time and space are one. Such places are unreckoned, unseen to all but very few, the dreamers: the Italian Polo and the old man Cavafy, Alexandria’s lover; the Lusitanian poet and the Venetian woman. One of them might know us yet, we who were the champions’ stage - long-buried Thebes in its antique robes, simple Tagata, poor and dusty Hejizhen, wild Tepoztlan, and I. Five ghosts of towns once great or small, gathered around a tiny fire, each telling its tale in a voice like the stir of ashes – the brothers at the seven gates, the hungry ronin, the outlaws and wanderers fighting for a life lost to them. 

The tale is told and told again, from one age to the next, the seven champions eternally reborn to stand unafraid in the hour of need: bronze-clad warriors with shield and spear or samurai in leather armour, katanas in hand; crusader knights with lance and mace or dusty riders with pistols and arrows. And it is our tale too, we who were their stage, their dancing-ground, and it will be others’ yet, others who will come to us touched by the same destiny and bearing the same tale. Though we may fade from the waking world, though our names may be forgotten and the grass grow where we once stood, the story is greater than all of us and while it is told we can never truly die.


End file.
